Since 2019, Le Gallais Estates has supported the Shelter Trust as their main charity.
Our goal was initially to raise £10,000 in the first year to help the Trust in its mission to provide a roof over people’s heads who, for one reason or another, have found themselves homeless. Since our partnership began we have managed to raise in excess of £15,000 each year and have have managed to raise over £50,000 to date.
The cost of running the five Shelter Trust premises open to all homeless people in Jersey is huge and ever increasing. We hope that by making a donation on your behalf once we sell or let your property, we can support the Trust in its invaluable work to provide a warm, safe home for those not able to buy or rent one of their own.
The Shelter Trust was established over 30 years ago and is now the leading provider of accommodation and support services for the homeless community in Jersey.
The Trust provides accommodation, food, support / encouragement for around 100 people per night at four sites in and around the town area.
The Trust support over 500 individuals per year.
The age range of Shelter Trust service is from 16-74. In recent years, the Trust has seen a big increase in the number of young people (under 25) becoming homeless.
Currently, around 30 per cent of our service users are aged between 16 and 25 years and, whereas historically around one in ten of the local homeless community were female, the number of young female service users in the Trust is more like three in ten.
Breakfast, lunch, dinner and supper are provided for service users at four of the sites (the fifth site is self-catering), this means more than 100,000 meals per year.
The reasons why an individual becomes homeless are many, nonetheless, several reasons as cited often enough by homeless people to bear repetition here; unemployment, substance misuse, mental health difficulties, physical health difficulties, returning to the community from prison, relationship and family breakdown. Sometimes there is simply a lack of appropriate, affordable accommodation.
“Rough sleeping” used to be a massive problem with 20-30 people a night sleeping in car parks and other venues. The work of the Trust and the Jersey Homeless Outreach Group ('JHOG'), has changed the situation completely to the odd person occasionally having to 'sleep rough' in a St Helier alley or carpark.
Nobody sets out to be or to remain homeless. The main aim of the Trust is to accommodate homeless people for as short a time as is practically possible before their return to mainstream accommodation and living.
Thank you for taking the time to read this